snubbed!

Is this the biggest Oscars robbery ever? Gays debate the Academy’s most egregious snubs

By · 37 comments · Updated on January 2, 2024
Image Credit: ‘Brokeback Mountain,’ Universal Pictures Home Entertainment

There’s a chill in the air and the sun’s setting way too early, but it’s finally starting to feel like our favorite season of the year! No, not autumn—awards season.

As movies big and small race to theaters (and streamers) before 2023 is up, armchair prognosticators are finalizing their watch lists and checking them twice, looking ahead to next year’s biggest awards ceremonies.

With the Oscars are very much on the brain, that’s likely what prompted Twitter X user @wetwalrus31to post the following question: What’s the biggest Oscar robbery of all time?

Simple question, complicated answer.

Every year, part of the narrative of the Academy Awards is who got snubbed—what actor, artist, film or filmmaker was so undeniable that they deserved recognition, but for whatever reason didn’t win their category, or didn’t even merit a nomination? The options are endless!

Despite only having a couple thousand followers, @wetwalrus31’s post must’ve struck a nerve because it’s garnered hundreds of replies, over a thousand quote-tweets (which in turn have even more quote-tweets), and upwards of 9.9M views.

Understandably, there’s nothing even remotely near to a consensus pick here. But, after a scroll through the responses, one movie seems to pop up more than anything else—one that’s near and dear to our hearts: Brokeback Mountain.

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Ang Lee’s story of closeted cowboys in love was a watershed moment for LGBTQ+ cinema at the Oscars, earning a whopping 8 nominations at the 2006 ceremony, including a Best Actor nod for Heath Ledger and Best Supporting Actor for Jake Gyllenhaal.

And it’s not like the Academy ignored it—hell, it won Best Score, Best Screenplay, and Best Director for Lee won—but all those trophies made it even more of a shocker when Brokeback Mountain lost Best Picture. To Crash, no less! A self-important ensemble drama that’s aged worse than a glass of milk sitting out in the sun.

So is Brokeback Mountain the most egregious snub ever? Lots of folks on the internet sure think so:

Guess you could say the Oscars really Crash-ed and burned that year.

And that last tweet above brings up an interesting point: Is institutional homophobia to blame? While the Academy has done a lot to diversify of late, the prevailing notion is that, for years, its collective “taste” speaks less to “the best films of the year” and more to “what these straight, older white men think is the best of the year.”

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Perhaps that explains why so many other actors who have played queer characters have been snubbed, even though we often joke that straight actors going gay for a role is shameless “awards bait.”

For every Milk (great performance, complicated actor) and The Whale (great actor, complicated performance), there are plenty of other LGBTQ+ roles that fans see as robbed by the Academy:

There are also a small (but hopefully growing) number of out, queer actors we folks have singled out as snubbed in recent years:

Even if we can’t agree on the “biggest Oscar” robbery of all time, there’s one thing we gays can agree on: Our favorite actresses are all severely underrated and all of them deserve trophy rooms full of Oscars, right?

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